Halo 3 Launch Only Hours Away

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Finish the wait at midnight tonight.

By Ryan Geddes

For those gamers who have been living in a remote, electricity-free cave for the past six months, we at IGN feel we owe you the service of the following announcement: Halo 3 goes on sale at midnight tonight.

Welcome back to civilization. Now take a long, hot shower, shave off the knee-length beard and finish the fight.

As if it were at all necessary to pound the point home further, Microsoft re-announced the pending release of Halo 3 today, reminding Master Chief-worshippers worldwide that the time-to-launch can now be counted in hours rather than days.

More than 1.5 million copies of Halo 3 have already been purchased through pre-orders, setting a new record for pre-launch sales and surpassing the previous record set by Halo 2 in 2004, Microsoft said.

After Halo 2 launched in November of that year, it generated a whopping $125 million in sales and remains the most-played game on Xbox Live to date almost three years later. But Halo 2's little brother is set to top even those record-smashing numbers, according to industry analysts quoted on the site GamesIndustry.biz today.

Goldman Sachs analysts Sarah Friar and Frederick Grieb predict in the article that Halo 3 may generate $170 million in revenue during Microsoft's first quarter, which ends five days after the game launches. Such a windfall would give the company's game division its first profitable quarter ever, the article notes.

More than 10,000 retail stores plan to open their doors for the Halo 3 launch at 12:01 a.m., and special Halo-themed events are planned at stores in New York, Miami, Seattle and Los Angeles. But will those retailers need to open a special station just for returns?

Now that some copies of the Halo 3 Limited Edition box set have shipped, some new owners are reporting that the game disk was found loose in the plastic case, unsecured by the plastic nub meant to hold the DVD in place. As a result, some of the disks appear to be scratched but playable, according to early reports.

A poster on the NeoGaf gaming forum said three copies of the Limited Edition disks they received were badly scratched. Three GameDaily.biz staffers report receiving scratched disks, and an IGN editor opened his Limited Edition box today to find a loose game disk with minor blemishes.

No similar problems with the Standard Edition and Legendary Edition have been reported. We'll keep you posted on the Limited Edition's reported issues and everything else Halo 3-related. For full coverage of the fight and the finishing thereof, head over to our Halo 3 launch center.